August 18, 2010

Oh, Ray Bradbury. You have not mellowed with age. He had these choice remarks at a recent event marking his 90th birthday:

Ray Bradbury is mad at President
Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a
construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City.

“He should be announcing that we
should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th
birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than
week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other
events. “We should never have left there. We should go
to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then
go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live
forever."

The man who wrote "Fahrenheit
451," "Something Wicked This Way Comes," "The
Martian Chronicles," "Dandelion Wine"and "The
Illustrated Man" has been called one of America's great
dreamers, but his imagination takes him to some dark places when it
comes to contemporary politics. “I think our country is in need of
a revolution."

“There is too much government today.
We've got to remember the government should be by the people,
of the people and for the people.”

---

“We have too many cellphones. We've
got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We
have too many machines now.”

Bradbury wrote darkly about bookburning
in "Fahrenheit 451," but he sounds ready to use a
Kindle for kindling. “I was approached three times during the last
year by Internet companies wanting to put my books" on an
electronic reading device, he said. "I said to Yahoo, 'Prick up
your ears and go to hell.' "

Yeah. Mr. Bradbury manages the amazing feat of encouraging political revolution because of a lack of a grand technological project which will make us immortal space gods, then tuns around and gives full throttle to the Luddite demons that have possessed him since way back when.

Is this hilarious? Yes. I can't help but being a little sad as well. Once upon a time, Bradbury was the ferociously cynical (yet humanistic) voice of a better sci-fi. He played a major role in igniting the medium's Deviant Age (also its Golden one, for my money) and his stories remain justly famed.

He's always been prickly, to put it kindly, but part of me always hoped that at some point he'd get past his prejudices and find some shred of the voice he once possessed in such abundance. We could certainly use it.

Nah. Chuck the machines, chuck the internet(s). The only majesty's in rocket ships. And we need to shoot the too-much-government motherfuckers who aren't getting us to Mars. STAT. Really, Mr. Bradbury?

On the other hand, perhaps he saw this:

Yes, take a moment. Then watch that again. Comedian Rachel Bloom hits one out of the park. "Fuck me, Ray Bradbury" is deliciously filthy and perfectly timed (see how she intones "you're a prolific author, Ray Bradbury"). It's unrepentant fun and, in its own strange way, a tribute to the wonder that the best of his works possessed while managing a catchy tribute to the kink side of geekdom.

July 23, 2010

I meant to post more this week, I really did. But journalism is, as ever, a demanding mistress and I'm now stuck in the middle of the Bele Chere chaos. I have amazing readers and I've been happy to see the impassioned response to my previous post/rant.

It is Friday, and so the least I can give you is a poem. This tour de force is from slam genius Anis Mojgani. Enjoy, and there will be more as soon as I physically have the time to write it.

Set the warriors to sea in a ship
stacked with shields, layers of swords, mountains of gold. Lay them
out with their wife. With their child. Lay them out with their
livestock, with the whole farm. The rain is not coming here. Not
today. For today the gods welcome one of their own back home. So set
the hero out on the soft waves that will carry him to the other side
of the pink ether where he will float on fire until the ash consumes
him like the mighty warrior he once was and like the legend he will
become. The flames will dance over his possessions, his goblets and
arrows, his blankets, his paintings, his passions. The flames will
dance across his flesh like the soft fingers of the soft lover he
left, and as he sleeps this last sleep, the fires will eat him away,
the heat will write his skin across the night sky to join the
constellations that will guide the sailors at storm, the herders lost
in the clouds, they will all come home by facing the direction his
eyes are facing. The heavens are filled with smoke. This is history
this is legend this is what we once were. Where the stories come
from, what we are. When you fall in battle, they will take your body
with the life you made in this world and set it off to sail behind
you into the next, so that you will stay a king, remain forever the
golden being you breathed as on this side of the mountain. When you
pass, may your life follow you like a shadow into the light. When I
go, bury me with nothing but my own skin. I spent far too many days
trying to outrun this thing called mine, so if I set myself into your
arms would you hold me like the earth, quietly? I am yours. Give me a
field, give me a big sky. A mountain. Give me your mouth. I’m just
looking for a quiet place that I could die inside of.

July 14, 2010

Author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich has a nice discourse on the problems of "The Secret" style positive thinking delusion illustrated by RSA.

It's worth listening to. I have my occasional complaints about Ehrenreich, but overall she's routinely raised issues that are often ignored in popular culture, and she's dead on with this one.

Readers may recall my own rant on the absurd expectation the "well-adjusted" means "perpetually happy." Ehrenreich rightly points out that the cult of positive thinking has some pretty nasty societal consequences too.

On the personal end of things, I'll be leaving the city to enjoy a nice relaxing time away from civilization for a bit, so no posting here until late in the weekend. Enjoy yourselves and, since it's Bastille Day, shank an aristocrat. For Freedom.

July 02, 2010

You've heard the following poem before, no doubt. It's one of Robert Frost's most famous and most overlooked at the same time. Most everyone knows, or has heard part of, the last stanza.

But read again, for I find as much in the first as the last. It is, like the paths its talks about, a deceptively tricky poem. Every day we make choices. Every last one of them carries an opportunity, and every last one of them has a cost.

June 24, 2010

I'm leaving later today for the West Coast, for Foo Camp. In the meantime, blogging will be light. Keep the homefires burning, y'all, and enjoy this assemblage of interesting links.

* The Skeleton Army Resisting the Salvation Army's attempts to shut down drinking dens in the 1880s, groups of ruffians banded together in a surprisingly organized fashion, calling themselves the Skeleton Army and fighting the pious Salvationists in the street in unrepentant defense of their vices.

They adopted macabre imagery like the Skull and Crossbones (obviously), along with the slogans "Blood and Thunder" and "Beef, beer and Bacca." This was all quite real, and another reminder that history is freaking awesome.

* 5 Reasons You Should Be Scare of Google Yes, it's a Cracked article, but one that makes some surprisingly good points. Some interesting info about exactly how far Google's reach extends, and how badly it's handled collisions with political and privacy issues. A reminder that putting your faith in companies as anything other than carefully watched tools is a bad idea.

* Monopolies, Gov 2.0 and Community The long knives come out in a fight over conferences and tech companies. Worth reading and some legit points about entrusting too much future government program development to large companies with a spotty track record. This is one of the reasons I keep calling for Gov 2.0 efforts to expand past the tech business-government agency sphere.

Another reason is that, were there a broader coalition, some enterprising activists would take this moment to say "Cut this squabbling shit out, we got work to do."

* In jail for being in debt Hellishly horrifying. Not only do large parts of the corporate classes act as if they're an aristocracy, but debtor's prisons (yes, you read that right) are making a comeback. Yes, this is quite illegal, but creditors have been slowly shoving back at debtors' protections, and this is the latest example of overreach. This sort of shit needs to be stopped now, before lettres de cachet and Dukedoms make a comeback as well.

* Coercive Games Some interesting ideas from John Robb on shifting non-violent political action away from the moribund protest cultures to actively ruining the peace of mind of officials from a larger organization who, right now, aren't being held responsible. Certainly, with the current lack of accountability, I don't think many would shed any tears if BP executives or corrupt officials started losing sleep and had their lives made hell. Fear is part of politics and movements that don't instill some measure of it into their opponents don't get very far.

At the same time, it's easy to see these tactics of individual intimidation having some pretty devastating impacts on the social fabric if widely enough applied. Food for thought.

* Saving newspapers, one dead blogger at a time Via Coilhouse comes this hilarious trailer for a fictitious Citizen Kane remakethat manages to also serve as a sharp satire of both "print is dying!" hysteria and over-the-top action movie cliches. I lost my shit at the AP Stylebook line.

June 18, 2010

It's time to answer this once and for all, because it gets asked a lot, and because it matters.

I do not believe in Collapse.

I do not believe in Apocalypse.

I do not believe in The End.

I believe in turmoil, I believe in death and despair. I believe in greed and hate. I believe in conflict and power. I believe in random chance and stupid mistakes. I believe in problems. All these things exist and the only way to deal with them is to face them head on.

But I do not believe in Collapse, not now and not tomorrow. We look at our own age in isolation, and forget that fifty years ago, or a century, or before, our ancestors were faced by terrors which to them seemed invincible. But there is nothing inevitable about a man hanging from a tree because of his race, there is nothing eternal about illiteracy or absolute monarchs. Concentration camps can be liberated, tyrants overthrown, forests replanted. People can learn. Despite all our multiple failures we do, and we have.

In nigh-every era previous, especially Breaking Times, people saw themselves surrounded by encroaching dooms on all sides, rather from above or from other people. But the world did not end. Even in dark ages, humanity survived and began the bloody trek up to something more, without even realizing it. Hell, we managed to come back from a damned Ice Age.

People believe in Collapse because the world is a scary, complicated place and now, more than ever, we're aware of how scary and complicated it is. So there's a yearning for a final cleaning, something that will wipe all the shit that vexes us away so we can finally sleep off the binge known as modern times.

Fuck that. Realize for a second that there is no Collapse waiting to conveniently remove from us the responsibility for adapting to the consequences of our world. Instead the complexities will multiply and mutate. Instead of oblivion we're actually going to have to deal with these challenges — risks and all — one by one, until something better arises in the process.

We're actually going to have grow up. Ain't that far, far more terrifying?

Yes, but it's also amazing. Because humanity is brilliant as we are stupid, stubborn as we are weak, resourceful as much as panicked. We create so many damn problems, but we can't help ourselves in trying to solve them. Sometimes, we even succeed.

And look at what we have: a more literate populace than ever before, a greater lifespan, the ability to draw inspiration and take warning from a dizzying array of cultures and histories. If ever we had the tools, it's now.

There is nothing certain about tomorrow. But I do not believe in Collapse. We have a future ahead of us, like it or not, and it's past time more of us started dealing with that, instead of expecting an end that will never fall.

June 14, 2010

The previously unknown deposits —
including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical
industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many
minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could
eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining
centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

There's my favorite Chinese curse, which goes "May you live in interesting times. May you attract the notice of those in high places. May you find what you are looking for." All three seem to apply in this case. Yet again a case of massive natural wealth found in a brutally fractious country. So far, much of the reaction I've heard has resembled "Oh. Shit."

Of course, the United States and many other industrial powerhouses once had massive resource reserves, but those have largely been used up and all the cheap stuff now lies underground of harsh political and geographical terrain.

Many of the devices powering the information revolution depend on lithium batteries. It will be interesting to see if technologists end up supporting bloodshed to keep that cheap, just as previous generations did to preserve cheap oil.

Of course, this cycle can't continue forever. We've got to find better ways of recycling old technology and using less resources in the new stuff.

Conor Friedersdorf argues the United States should run away from the Afghan resources, "sending someone else across the
minefield in our stead. The United Nations? The World Bank? The China
Mineral Corporation? Whoever it is, better that they suffer the
consequences of this find than that we do."

It's a particularly shocking display of privilege, unjustifiable under free market ideals or any other. The translation on his statement is easy: "Shut up peasant, and pay your betters."

* Culinary diplomacy with the Axis of Evil Cafe The Conflict Kitchen, started by a group of Pittsburgh artists, features food from places the U.S. is on bad terms with. The project is intended "to help people see these countries as
everyday, human places that are defined by more than just their
policies and government."

The article has a particularly interesting account of a meal (and the ensuing conversation) via satellite between a group in Tehran and Pittsburgh.

* New Soft City One of the latest augmented reality proposal. We'll see how it pans out. I'm waiting for the inevitable black market/social uses of this technology to start arising and honestly I find them more fascinating than seeing in flashier ways if the buses are running on time.

* And Still They Cry Out On the anniversary of the Green Uprising, rebel calls still ring from Tehran rooftops.

June 03, 2010

With faster, masstier (it's a word now, dammit) media, mass fear becomes easier to achieve. Part of this is the downside of an imaginative age: being able to envision all sorts of possibilities includes plenty of horrors too. Part of it is the fact that most humans in industrialized nations live drastically comfortable lives compared to most of their ancestors.

However, at some level people are aware that much of the world (and even plenty in their own lands) are in a much more terrible state. So there's a very primal fear of a sudden disaster sweeping that all away. Hence politicians and prognosticators can make some hay out of situations that, while terrible, are extremely unlikely to come to pass.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent post on exactly this topic:

At a security conference recently, the
moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what
their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array
of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure,
against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination
with a physical attack.

I didn't get to give my answer until
the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare scenario is that people
keep talking about their nightmare scenarios."

There's a certain blindness that comes
from worst-case thinking. An extension of the precautionary
principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then
acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for
thinking, speculation for risk analysis, and fear for reason. It
fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and magnifies social
paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of
terrorism.

Worst-case thinking means generally bad
decision making for several reasons. First, it's only half of the
cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks
and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong, and
then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking
focuses only on the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job
at assessing outcomes.

Second, it's based on flawed logic. It
begs the question by assuming that a proponent of an action must
prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible.

Third, it can be used to support any
position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power plant, it could
melt down. If we don't build it, we will run short of power and
society will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near
Iceland's volcanic ash, planes will crash and people will die. If we
don't, organs won’t arrive in time for transplant operations and
people will die. If we don't invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use
the nuclear weapons he might have. If we do, we might destabilize the
Middle East, leading to widespread violence and death.

Of course, not all fears are equal.
Those that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by
worst-case thinking. So terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and
almost everything else; technology is hard to understand and
therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional weapons;
our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the
planet is bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot
is amenable to worst-case thinking.

Fourth and finally, worst-case thinking
validates ignorance. Instead of focusing on what we know, it focuses
on what we don't know -- and what we can imagine.

Exactly. Dwelling in all this is an unspoken truth that most people don't want to face: there is no such thing as absolute security. Of course, no political leader wants to go on television and say "look, we'll take every reasonable precaution and do our best to protect you, but in the end there's no way to stop every maniac from doing some damage or an unforeseen natural disaster. You might die from something we can't do shit about, no matter how capable we are."

Of course, that's hardly a comforting thought, but it is reality. It's something people are generally hesitant to face in their personal lives too. We don't want to think about the fact that we may be healthy, capable and smart, but still die randomly because there are simply too many big, unpredictable things out there to prepare perfectly against every last one. We can all be eaten by the storm.

Furthermore, trying to prepare for every possibility is insane and leads to paranoia personally and societally. Since it involves choices, over-preparing for one thing opens up vulnerabilities to others. A society paranoid about invasion will pour cash into their military, but neglect infrastructure and other essentials, actually making a catastrophe more likely (this was one factor in the USSR's fall).

This isn't an excuse for a lack of prudent preparation, of course. Safety rules, contingency plans and rainy-day funds all exist for a reason, and on a societal level, people should insist that they function. A positive approach is best summed up by the "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude of London during the Blitz: not reckless, but not freaking out at the fact that danger existed.

Similarly, on a personal level, being aware of your surroundings, living a healthy life and knowing how to defend yourself all decrease the odds of catastrophe.

But they do not eliminate it. Sooner or later, that's something we all have to face. If any of us want to end up a future worth having, we'd probably better start demanding it in our culture as well. There are many routes to a better tomorrow. Fear is not one of them.

May 21, 2010

Today's poem is a classic of individual determination written by William Ernest Henley, a Victorian poet who survived tuberculosis of the bone and the amputation of part of his leg. It reflects a steely-eyed refusal to surrender but was much idealized by the mentality of his day. It's a vision with its dark side (as are they all), but it is a classic for a reason, and bears repeating: